Four Months Later
by roane
Summary: After the Fall, John struggles to come to terms with what he's lost. (Follow up to In One Month, following the same prompts.)
1. Holding Hands

His hand had still been warm. John keeps coming back to that, worrying at it like a terrier. He can't get past it. He's a doctor. He understands how death works. He understands the slow cooling-off as the body stops regulating its temperature, giving off heat until it reaches the ambient temperature, stasis achieved. But in his heart of hearts, where logic and science have no sway, John cannot understand how Sherlock's hand could have been warm with no pulse beneath his skin.

He'd held on to Sherlock's hand as long as he could. If he'd held on long enough, would he have felt the returning pulse? Or would he have felt Sherlock's hand slowly reach room temperature?

Even now, a month later, John can remember how Sherlock's hand had fallen from his and landed limp on the pavement. He can remember little else, but he remembers that. He remembers a cacophony of voices, hands trying to pull him away from his rightful place at Sherlock's side. He hates every single one of them still.

The feel of Sherlock's cooling, bloodless hand in his has driven out all other sense memory. John can't remember how it felt to kiss him, or to touch him in any other way but that clinical, rote grasp of the wrist. Of all the things that Sherlock's death has cost him, those lost memories are the worst.

A month later, and life has reasserted its routines. He's unpacked all but a few boxes in his new flat. It's horrible, but at least he can sleep there. He never would have at Baker Street. He would have roamed the flat all night, looking at each single trace that Sherlock had lived there. He would have fixated on the molecules of Sherlock that were left behind: skin, hair, everything that forensics would reveal to the right pair of eyes. Better that he live somewhere else, somewhere that has no trace of Sherlock at all.

Except that's not quite true. Sherlock left traces of himself behind, indelibly marked into John's mind and heart.

John carries those traces with him as he goes about his daily life, his new daily life, with shifts at the surgery, pub night with Stamford and Mary. If he'd never known anything more, he'd say it was a good life. Productive.

It's unbearably dull.

Mycroft calls for the first time since the day after. (From now on, in John's life, there is no more need to specify 'after what'.) On the day after, he'd come by to see John, and John had punched him and thrown him out of the flat, calling him a lying, betraying bastard.

Perhaps understandably, they hadn't spoken since.

"John," Mycroft says when John answers, "it's ready. I thought you might like to know."

John hangs up without saying a word. He doesn't know if Mycroft understands how things were in those last months. Mrs Hudson seems to know, but never asks directly. John can't bring himself to tell anyone, even though the need for secrecy is long since past.

To say the words out loud now, when he could never say them to Sherlock, feels like a desecration. He wonders sometimes, on the nights when he can't sleep and he stares at his ceiling, did Sherlock know? John thinks that he must have. They said it to each other every day in every way except with the words: a perfect cup of tea by Sherlock's computer, a hand pressed into the small of John's back while he cooked dinner.

John also wonders-he can't stop himself-if he had said it out loud, if he had said it on that last phone call, would Sherlock still have jumped?

Did Sherlock know? He must have, he was Sherlock, after all. He knew everything about John from the moment they first met. John isn't sure what would be worse, that Sherlock died without knowing how John felt, or that he knew, and jumped anyway.

He calls Mrs Hudson and they arrange a visit. It's a quiet afternoon; the graveyard is empty but for a few grounds workers who keep their respectful distance.

John falls back on empty words and routine, but when Mrs Hudson leaves him alone in front of the simple black tombstone that reads only "SHERLOCK HOLMES", he is lost. He fumbles for words that won't come. Finally he gives up and touches the stone.

It's warm and smooth-how can it be warm? It's like touching skin-for a moment, John is touching skin, and everything floods back: the feel of Sherlock's chest under his palms, the press of their bodies together, the taste of stolen kisses. He pulls his hand away and steps back, a half-animal sound of pain escaping him.

He babbles then, trying to talk past the pain, begging Sherlock not to be dead. Then his voice cracks and his composure is gone. For a moment he can only stand and weep. John gives in, but keeps his face covered with one hand.

He stops it almost as quickly as it started. He takes a deep breath and wipes his eyes.

Then John turns and walks away from the grave, refusing to look back.


	2. Cuddling Somewhere

It's at the end of a double A&E shift that saw John treating everything from a sinus infection to head trauma sustained in a bar fight. He walks through his front door and closes it, leaning heavily against it and shutting his eyes. His feet feel like the LIttle bloody Mermaid trying to walk on land.

When he opens his eyes, John thinks at first he's finally cracked. The grief, the long hours, it's all been too much.

Sherlock's coat is hanging from the peg by his door.

John stares at it, his heart threatening to batter its way out of his chest. He pushes away from the wall and takes a step towards it, expecting it to vanish every time he blinks his eyes. "Sh-" He starts to say it, then bites the word back viciously.

It doesn't take long for him to clear the flat. The bedroom, the tiny kitchen, the sitting room, they're all empty.

He goes back and stares at the coat, hanging where he usually hangs his keys and his own coat.

It's a cruel joke. It has to be. A copy.

Except that it isn't. John knows that coat. He followed that coat across half of London and knows it as well as he knew its owner. He recognizes the snag on the left sleeve from where they climbed a wooden fence and Sherlock got caught on a nail. There's an acid burn on the right shoulder, from where the coat had been tossed over a kitchen chair and splashed during an experiment. John looks, and sure enough, the burn is there.

It's Sherlock's coat.

Someone's tried to clean it. It should be covered in blood. Shouldn't it? There's no sign of blood at all.

John lifts the sleeve with the snag, and before he's thought about it, he buries his face in the fabric.

It's impossible, it's absolutely impossible after all this time, and John knows that this _must_ be his imagination, but he could swear that it still smells like Sherlock. There's a faint smell of cigarette smoke, from the times Sherlock pretended he hadn't sneaked one and John pretended he didn't have a sense of smell. Then there's just the overlaying Sherlock-smell, a smell John never noticed when Sherlock was alive, but that he couldn't stop noticing after Sherlock died.

His mobile beeps.

_From: +447700900781 9:24_  
_I thought you'd want this returned to you. The coroner's office released it._

John had never asked what became of Sherlock's personal effects afterwards. He wasn't family. He had no standing to ask those questions. He just assumed that everything of Sherlock's went to Mycroft, and after John had nearly broken Mycroft's nose for him, John didn't expect any further courtesies. He doesn't recognize the number, but with Mycroft, that's nothing unusual.

John reaches out and touches the coat, then turns towards the kitchen.

Later, after he's eaten dinner from tins and made one last mug of tea, John takes the coat down from its peg and brings it over to the battered sofa with him. The flat is a drafty old place, and is always chilly. Without thinking too much about it, John pulls Sherlock's coat over his lap, then lies down, drawing it up over his shoulders.

It's as ridiculous as ever. John remembers the night that Sherlock gave him the coat to wear, the night his old coat was ruined. It had dragged the ground then; it covers his feet now. It had been warm from Sherlock's body then; now the only warmth is John's.

He had been so confused that night, by his own feelings, by the desire for more of Sherlock's warmth. He'd wasted so much time being confused, being uncertain, being afraid. Now it seems like he'll never be completely warm again.

He closes his eyes, just for a moment, breathing in molecules from a dead man's lungs, and pretends the warmth he feels is borrowed, rather than reflected.


	3. Watching a Movie

**AN:** Spoilers for Doctor Who, "The Angels Take Manhattan".

* * *

"Are you sure you're up for this?"

"Yeah. It's time, I think." John settles on the sofa in Mary's flat. She carries over a bowl of popcorn and two bottles of beer, settling it all down on the table in front of them.

"Well, you've missed a _lot_." Mary grins at him before sitting down across from him. She never asks him how he's doing. She never asks him anything about Sherlock. Her flat is comfortable and John never has to talk. It's perfect, in a lot of ways. They watch movies, television shows, swap army stories.

They don't talk about the present. They don't talk the attraction that was, or whether it is or isn't still present. (It is, but it's not time. John feels it more like a distantly-remembered sweetness than an active pull.)

On this particular Saturday afternoon, John has decided it's high time he got caught up on _Doctor Who_. He's been avoiding it; he was afraid it would remind him too much of the case he helped Sherlock solve, with the cosplayers and the prop gun.

But here, in this place, with late afternoon sunshine outside, and Mary's comforting presence, he feels good.

They start in on the latest series, and it's like meeting up with an old, old friend. John laughs the way he hasn't laughed in months. His eyes get a little misty in places (where else but on Doctor Who could you get teary eyed over a golf ball-chasing triceratops?) but they're not real tears, not real pain.

They start the last episode before the mid-series break, and John sits up a little bit. He's heard this is where the Doctor's latest companions are leaving, and he's eager to see how it plays out. Mary is sprawled at the other end of the sofa, with her feet on his lap.

Everything is absolutely fine until near the end. Amy and Rory stand on a rooftop in New York City in 1938, and John feels his pulse beat a little bit faster. But this isn't real, and he's all right.

The Statue of Liberty-of all things!-is looming threateningly. "Just keep your eyes on that!"

_Keep your eyes fixed on me. Please, will you do this for me?_

John breathes shallowly through his mouth. He's fine. He's fine. It's not the same at all. There are two living people on that roof. It's not the same.

"If you love me, then trust me, and push," says Rory, standing on the ledge. Death is the only way out.

_Liberty in death, isn't that the saying?_

"Could you? If it was me, could you do it?"

"To save you, I could do anything."

John can't hide the tension any more. He should say something, ask Mary to stop the recording.

But it's too late. They're falling. They fall together and they embrace mid-fall and John can't breathe. He can't breathe, he can't move. He feels the stones of the street underneath his cheek, feels bruises that will form from the biker that hit him.

There's a thud, that sickening thud that he will hear until the day he dies-but no, it was only the sound of him knocking a beer bottle over.

"John? _John_. Oh shit, I'm so sorry, I should have realised-" Mary is touching him, and that's wrong. She wasn't there on the pavement next to him, how can she be shaking his arm?

"No," the sound comes out of him with no air behind it because there's no air in his lungs anymore. It was knocked out when he hit the pavement, when his skull shattered and ribs splintered and his organs compacted and-but no, that wasn't John. It only feels as if it were.

His heart is still beating-hammering, in fact. His hands are shaking, he's shaking all over.

"Look at me," says Mary, and John finds that he can. It helps. She's solid, and _there_, and it gives him something to hold on to and pull himself out of his own mind. "I'm so sorry," she repeats. "I completely forgot-"

"It's-" he clears his throat, closing his hands into fists to stop the tremors. "It's fine." John's voice doesn't sound like his own, it sounds far away and harsh. "Just caught me off-guard."

"Wait here," Mary says, and what else is he going to do? John sits and waits and breathes. Air moves in and out of his lungs without his even trying.

When she returns, she's carrying a cup of tea, and she presses it into his hands. The ceramic mug is almost too hot against his palms, but he holds on anyway, letting it burn, savoring the pain. It's real and tangible. It's bearable because he knows how to make it stop.


	4. On a Date

A few weeks later, they're sitting in the Indian restaurant down the street from Mary's flat, having an early dinner. John's gone off telly for the time being, but they can still sit and chat. Mary's dressed a little sharper than usual. For the first time since they started their regular routine of evenings together, John wonders if he's actually on a date without realising it. Then he wonders if he's actually a prelude to a real date she's meeting later.

"John?" Mary touches his hand. "You didn't hear a word I said, did you?" she teases.

"You were talking about... your nieces?" John gives his best sheepish smile.

"Now, see if you'd been paying attention you would have heard a fantastically thrilling story about my job, but now you've missed out." Mary stabs her fork into a piece of lamb for emphasis.

"I thought you couldn't talk about your job anymore," John says, toying with his curry. "All that secrecy and riding around in mysterious black cars."

"No, that's still Anthea," Mary says. "She looks better in heels than I do. And her security clearance is higher."

John hasn't forgotten the exchange between Mary and Anthea the night of the art gallery reception, with their talk of security clearances. "So tell me again. What's Mycroft got you doing, if not kidnapping innocent sods off the streets?"

"Kidnapping guilty sods off the streets," Mary says without missing a beat, biting off a forkful of food.

"No really," John presses.

Mary just tilts her head and looks at him. "Should have listened the first time, John. It was terribly exciting. Just because you can't-" Her mobile chimes. She looks at it and frowns. "Sorry. I need to nip out and return this."

The bill comes while she's out, and John pays it, out of stubborn pride as much as anything. She's doing better than he is, no doubt, with her posh new government job, but he prefers to ignore that.

When she comes back, there's a glint in her eye that John understands immediately. _Trouble. The fun kind._ "I'm so sorry," she says, although he's pretty sure she isn't. He wouldn't be. She doesn't sit down. "It's an emergency. I have to-"

John's already standing. "Go," he says. "You know, used to be it was the younger Holmes brother who interrupted my dates."

Mary smiles, a little surprised, but pleased-looking. She leans in and kisses him on the cheek. "I have to go." She pauses. "I'll need to be extra careful, you know. It would be awfully easy for someone to follow me, where I'm going." She says it with a funny weight to her words, and carefully doesn't look at him as she turns away.

_It would be awfully easy for someone to follow me._ Why does she want him to follow her? He wishes suddenly he still carried around the Browning, but it's locked safely away in a cabinet in his flat. John follows her out of the restaurant, his heart racing, adrenaline flooding his body in an old, familiar way, like sliding into a favorite jumper.

He gets outside just in time to see Mary round a corner-wherever she's going, she's not taking a cab or one of Mycroft's cars. When she starts descending the stairs to go below street level, John tries to remember if he and Sherlock ever took the Underground to a crime scene. She's right about one thing: it's easy to follow her. No doubt if she wanted to lose him she could, but she shows no sign that she knows he's following.

They wind up in Clapham, outside a building that promises low weekly rates on its flats. The building makes John's flat look exceedingly posh. When Mary goes inside, John decides he should wait outside. He finds the alleyway next to the building and settles by a rubbish skip.

Rotting garbage isn't a smell that should make one sentimental, but the scent, combined with the night air and the feeling of adrenaline in his blood and brick against his back, is overpowering for several minutes. How many nights did he and Sherlock spend, almost exactly like this? All that's missing is, well, Sherlock.

Ella told him-before he stopped seeing her-that grief would eventually reach a point where it stopped ambushing him randomly. But for now, the best he can do is stand in a dodgy alleyway with a lump in his throat and swallow over and over, trying to force it back down.

There's a crash overhead as one of the windows shatters. John looks up to see a bald man bent backwards over the windowsill. He can't see who's holding him there, but he has a very good guess. As he watches, the man manages to twist and starts wriggling out of the window, reaching for the fire escape immediately to his left. He stops, looks back in the window, gives what looks like a vicious kick, then pulls himself free of the window, leaving him hanging off the fire escape.

John tries to catch his breath and his focus, to figure out what he needs to do. The man is almost certainly the one that Mary was sent to retrieve. If he doesn't fall and crack his head on the pavement, and if he doesn't decide to climb up to the roof, John will be in a perfect position to capture him.

As John watches from the shadows of the rubbish skip, the man manages to haul himself over the railing of the fire escape, and starts climbing down. Mary leans out of the shattered window, and from here John can see the swelling in her cheek. Despite that, he almost swears that she looks in his direction and winks.

When the man dangles down off the last rung of the fire escape ladder, John leaves his shadows. He lets go of the rung, and in that split second before his feet actually touch the ground, John catches him in a rough tackle around the waist, using his momentum to slam the man down to the alley pavement. The man makes a pained grunt as the air gets knocked from his lungs, but he starts scrabbling to get away immediately.

John is ready for him, and manages to press him down with a knee in his back. The man's arms are pinned as well. He may outweigh John, but he won't be able to escape without causing himself some serious pain.

Over the sound of the man cursing and struggling, he hears footsteps in the alley and looks up to see Mary coming towards him. He was right about the swelling-she's going to have a hell of a bruise tomorrow morning. "Why, what in the world are you doing here?" she asks, deadpan.

John grins and starts to answer, when the man beneath him gives a violent, jack-knifing lurch and nearly succeeds in throwing John off. He turns over before John has a chance to re-pin him, and John is struck with an unsettling sense that he knows the man from somewhere. Someone he and Sherlock questioned for a case? He punches John in the throat hard enough to make John's vision go wavery. John blindly fumbles for the man's arms, trying to reestablish his hold while struggling to catch his breath.

"That's enough of that," Mary says, and John hears the sound of her racking the slide of her firearm. The man stops struggling, and John pats him down quickly, finding the Glock tucked into a shoulder holster. He tucks it into the back of his jeans and goes on to find two different knives hidden on the man. "Let him up, slowly," says Mary. John does, essentially hauling the larger man to his feet before pinning his arms behind his back once more. Mary tosses him a set of flexicuffs and John secures him. "His ride is on the way."

Now that he's secured, John keeps looking at the man. He's maddeningly familiar. Something about his squashy, snub-nosed face makes John think of Mrs Hudson for some reason. It'll come to him, but damn. To Mary he says, "Are you going to have to explain me?"

She shakes her head, keeping her gun trained on their captive. "No, I'll just have to explain how I managed to let myself be followed."

In the end, there isn't much explaining at all. The man is bundled into a black car and whisked away without a sign of a police officer. It raises a hundred questions for John, who remembers Mary's earlier words about "kidnapping guilty sods off the streets".

"So what was this all about?" John says, leaning down to knock some of the alley dirt from his knees.

"I can't tell you."

"But you could let me follow you?" John looks up at her, hands braced on his thighs. "And it's a bloody good thing you did, by the way. He would have gotten away."

"If I didn't know you were behind me, I would've called for back up." Mary seems to be watching him carefully. John decides to watch her right back. "I just thought... I don't know. That you might have fun."

He debates telling her about the surge of grief that hit him, the near-flashback quality of the memories stirred by alleyway sights and smells, but he can't-because despite that, it _was_ fun. He knows if he were remotely normal, he'd be bothered by that, and he'd be bothered by whatever extra-judicial fate awaited the man they'd captured.

He isn't bothered in the slightest.


End file.
